fercho07's picture

I am using the symfony appliance 4 months ago with no problem. Really a cool appliance that give me a lots of facilities at development time. But suddenly, start my computer and when i want to boot the appliance it gets stuck in one point and i can't do nothing.

Any idea ? Please, help me ! I was working too hard the last days and all the progress is lost !!

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Liraz Siri's picture

If you've been using TKLBAM to perform regular backups, then you should try installing a fresh installation of Symfony and restoring.

Otherwise, you'll need to provide much more information if there's any hope of anyone being able to help you. Screenshots of where exactly the appliance is getting stuck would help.

fercho07's picture

 

I didn't perform any backup that's the reason i'm desperate. I attach a screenshot where the appliance stuck. Do you need another screenshot ?

PLEASE, I NEED TO RECOVER MY WORK.

Jeremy Davis's picture

And run fsck on sda as well as perhaps the LVM too. See what happens then.

If you can clean the filesystem up enough to mount it it may be worth try to copy out the data while you're at it just in case you can't recover your VM.

Post another screenshot of the boot process - the first time you boot after running fsck. I'm certainly no expert in these things but from a glance at your screenshot I'm not clear on how much is the result of a 'dirty' shutdown (after a freeze) and how much is actually an issue in and of itself.

Bet you'll have a backup next time!? It sucks I know, I've been there too... but it's the sort of mistake you only make once!

Liraz Siri's picture

It looks like your filesystem borked. There may or may not be physical damage to underlying storage medium (e.g., hard disk). If there's no physical damage fsck might be able to help you fix a filesystem inconsistency. But anyhow there's no point in running it against the swap volume as the swap is not a filesystem. You should try to run it on /dev/sda1, where it looks like your root filesystem lives.

As JedMeister suggested, running in Live CD mode and probing what is left of your filesystem is your best option at this point. No guarantees though. You may have lost data. Losing data is actually inevitable if you don't backup. Given enough time any storage medium will eventually fail. But don't despair just yet. You might have gotten lucky.

Jeremy Davis's picture

Good idea on setting up TKLBAM!

Have a read of the TKLBAM Docs - specifically the FAQ

Here's a couple that look useful to regarding local storage:
http://www.turnkeylinux.org/faq/backup-and-migration-tklbam#t602n2375
http://www.turnkeylinux.org/faq/backup-and-migration-tklbam#t601n2384

Backup frequency is probably worth consideration too:
http://www.turnkeylinux.org/faq/backup-and-migration-tklbam#t601n2378

fercho07's picture

As i know, TKLBAM needs "duplicity" to work but when i run duplicity in the terminal, the command is not recongnized, why ?

Jeremy Davis's picture

I have never used Duplicity standalone so I'm no help there. But AFAIK you do not need to directly use Duplicity to use TKLBAM, TKLBAM takes care of that in the backgroud. Having said that though, as Duplicity is the backend for TKLBAM I would assume that it is already installed?!

fercho07's picture

I also assume that but i can't find it. I would like to talk directly with duplicity to do a local storage backup with no need to register on the hub.

Jeremy Davis's picture

Like this:

dpkg-query -l duplicity

If not install  it

apte-get update
apt-get install duplicity

But TBH the Hub makes life so much easier. You can keep track of all your backups etc really easily. I know you have to sign up to Amazon, but if you don't use the online storage you don't get charged. I can vouch for that. Anyway, your call.

fercho07's picture

Ok, just because i believe in you :-) i create an account in turnkey hub and amazon. Then, i did my first local backup this way:

tklbam-init [api-key]
tklbam-backup --address scp://user:password@host/dir/
tklbam-escrow ./key (i save the key in the VM and them copy to the host because i can't find the way to do it directly like the backup)

I can't find in the editor how to put that in a <code> tag :-(

So, ok.... i have my first backup but i have some questions:

  • A full backup is executed by default once a month (1M), and of course, this will be done in Amazon S3, right ? So, how can i configure the VM to doesn't make an automatic full backup. Or better, can i configure to do it automatic to the storage like i did it manually ?
  • The first backup is a full backup, or i think so. What next ? I have to do incremental daily backups ? Can i do it to a local storage ?

Thanks, Fernando.

Jeremy Davis's picture

TKLBAM uses cron for automated backups so you edit them either directly and for both frequency and the command they run ie so you are backing up locally rather than to the cloud.

fercho07's picture

One more question: when i do a local storage backup, tklbam doesn't get a new backup ID, is normal ?

Jeremy Davis's picture

But When TKLBAM was first released I did use it locally (hence why I could vouch for it costing nothing).

After a bit of playing I decided that AWS prices were cheap enough to justify using the full features of TKLBAM (ie S3 storage via the Hub). I use it as a remote backup of the work Fileserver which holds ~6GB of files. It currently costs just over $2.00 per month (I only keep 2 full backups and most of the files added each month are small ones so have noticed only minimal increase in size over time - something in the region of 1-5c/mth increase). If you have only just signed up to Amazon then you'd be eligible for the free tier which gives you 5GB of free S3 storage (although I'm not 100% sure whether that applies to TKLBAM as it uses a separate bucket to your normal S3 - perhaps you still have to pay?) and 1x 24/7/365 free micro instance (or 2x 12/7/365 etc).

Also as its a full appliance backup rather than a file level tool it's not really ideal for my purposes for general file backups so I run local backups separately (ie I don't use TKLBAM for that). I just use TKLBAM for remote backup. The beauty being that if I do ever want to use a backup I can just restore to AWS (EC2) and get at my data quickly, easily and cheaply (assuming that I'm finished within an hour it's less than 10c!)

Anyway I don't mean to sound like a walking advertisement for TKLBAM/Hub/AWS - it's just that I'm a big fan (obviously). You do what works best for you and you're comfortable with. Long story short I don't have answers for you, sorry...

fercho07's picture

Thank you very much for your reply !

 

So, can you tell me what do you use for local backup ? :-)

Jeremy Davis's picture

I have a cron job that runs every night and changes the file permissions (so no changes can be made to existing files on the server) then syncs them all with another VM. Its not very efficient as it requires manual version control on the files (ie when a file is edited it needs to be manually renamed) but it works for now.

I have plans to use something better in the future, probably KnowledgeTree for document management and Bacula for local backups but I do the IT stuff at work off the side of my desk so changes happen slowly. I have had a bit of a play with both of these and I think Bacula particularly has promise (KnowledgeTree has a bit of a learning curve and seeing as I'll have to train the other staff I need to get my head around it a bit more).

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